Hello and welcome to Best Laid Plans.

This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is a podcast where we talk all things planning

and planning adjacent.

Today I have a little bit of a mixed bag episode for you because it's going to be half follow-up on last week's topic, which was kind of a hot topic in terms of the response I got back.

And then the other half I'm going to get a little personal and talk about my current feelings on AI, which I feel a little bit nervous to even discuss this because I feel like it is such

a delicate topic, but I'm going to do my best. Just share where I am right now with the

current AI landscape. All right, but we're going to begin with a follow-up because last week we talked a

little bit about, well, I talked about whether or not planning saves money. And this was spurred on

by a comment that I was sent by a listener who was wondering what I thought about the relationship

between planning and saving money. And I went on to say, well, I think planning can be used to save your money, but I would not

rely on planning to automatically save you money because in my experience, it can save money in some

instances in terms of buying things ahead of time. But I also tend to think of fun things that I want

to do in the future as I'm planning, and those

things can be costly.

So for me, it was hard to say one way or another, whether planning would definitively

save a person money.

But I thought it might be helpful to share some examples I got from listeners because

I got a few and people felt pretty passionate.

So the first one comes from a listener

named Bridget, who says, you asked on today's show about how planning saves people money,

and for me, the number one way it does is preventing unplanned takeout and restaurant spending.

She says, I eat out when it's a deliberate choice, usually a social occasion or one-on-one time with one of my kids or a rare treat-yourself meal on my own when my batteries are low and I need to pick me up, but I eat the vast majority of my meals cooked at home which requires planning and routines.

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